He shifts from calling Republicans backward and divisive to bragging on how HE fixed the economy around the eleven-minute mark.

“Just remember when you hear these folks bragging about the economic miracle, just remember when it started”.

If you compare it to last week’s speech you’ll see a pattern. He brags about being the real fountainhead of the successes that have put Small Business optimism above even their previous high-water mark of 1983 under Reagan. And he lays at Trump’s feet all the division that Obama’s party’s deliberate embrace of Identity Politics has stoked for years.

It’s classic bait-and-switch.

So, what about his claims of being the real author of the economy? There’s a very simple way to test who owns this economy. It’s the closest thing we have to a scientific test we can apply to political promises. Compare the policy results with the predictions that were made.

Let’s start with a sampling of Team Obama’s Predictions

In 2012:

The future of American jobs is NOT in manufacturing said Cristina Romer, the former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers in a 2012 NPR piece which, refuting Romney’s suggestion that there was still a future for US manufacturing:

AS an economic historian, I appreciate what manufacturing has contributed to the United States. It was the engine of growth that allowed us to win two world wars and provided millions of families with a ticket to the middle class. But public policy needs to go beyond sentiment and history. … So far, a persuasive case for a manufacturing policy remains to be made …

In 2014:

The good times may be over for good. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York yesterday, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the US GDP growth rate, adjusted for inflation, is now projected to run a little above 2% a year. That would be a significant downshift from the 3.4% average growth rate from the end of World War II until 2007.
[…]
In his speech, Lew said, “many today wonder whether something that has always been true in our past will be true in our future.” (Indeed, the 2013 Obama budget declared, “In the 21st Century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower than it was in earlier eras . . . .”)
Source: James Pethokoukis, Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

And in 2016, in repsonse to a steel worker’s question about Carrier, Obama himself said ‘Some jobs are just not coming back.

A steel worker union official asked President Barack Obama at a June 1 town hall in Elkhart, Indiana about job losses at a plant run by Carrier, an air conditioning manufacturer that recently announced plans to move jobs from Indiana to Mexico. He replied that some jobs “are just not going to come back,” while others are in flux or rebounding.
Source: RealClearPolitics

And when Trump claimed otherwise, Obama taunted him with a dig about ‘what kind of magic wand are you going to wave’. (That quote later became a meme: Trump saying ‘Abracadabra, Bitch!’ was one of several versions.)

And What Were Trump’s Promises?

He said America is getting screwed by trade policies and would renegotiate them to be more fair to US interests.

He said companies would return to America.

He said we would see jobs growth and a lot of it:

Throughout the election campaign Mr Trump focused mostly on increasing manufacturing jobs, which have declined by around five million since 2000. Much of that decline has been caused by improvements in technology, however, not outsourcing.

He has promised to create 25 million jobs over 10 years and to double economic growth to 4%, a rate which hasn’t been seen since the Bill Clinton presidency in the 1990s. Last year the US economy expanded by 2.4%. — Source: BBC

And he said our GDP would be YUGE.

We’ve got two presidents, with very different outlooks on the future.

Obama’s sad predictions may very well have been true, after all — IF he had continued another 8 years as president. Have another look at our critique of his LAST speech with special interest in the clip where Hannity gave a brutal blow-by-blow breakdown of Obama’s economic failures over 8 years.

It’s OK Obama, nobody will EVER be the Food Stamps king that you were.

There is one other complicating factor in comparing the two.

Policy changed in 2017, when Trump took office.

Red tape was slashed, and significant tax changes to the tax code since he took office. These had immediate effects on the economy, including cash bonuses to employees, which Nancy Pelosi has called ‘crumbs’, and 80% of Americans receiving tax cuts.

Keeping all that in mind, let’s look at the result, and see who came closer to the mark:

To sum up the comparison between the two:

Trump promised we would have ‘so much winning that we can’t take it anymore’.

Economic indicators are all lighting up like Christmas trees. Employment levels across all demographics — including minorities, women and millennials — are booming. Family income, Small business optimism, stock markets are all way up. And that trend changed dramatically AFTER the election.

Now it looks like Trump is creating the kind of economy he promised, with growth targeted at the downscale (including blacks and Hispanics) rather than the upscale, with lower economic inequality and with growth spreading to regions that have seen little of it for decades. Do you remember any mainstream media or liberal economist who envisioned such results?
[…]
So maybe this is not a case of promises kept but just dumb luck. Of course you can say the same thing — just dumb luck — about the 100 electoral votes Trump targeted and won. But after a while, you might wonder.
Source: NYPost

So WHAT is Obama’s campaigning all about, anyway.

Why is Obama campaigning? There’s a lot riding on this election. If House and Senate get won back to his side, not only can they proceed with launching investigations into Trump’s businesses and start impeachment, they can also bring a screeching halt to any investigations into the scandal that involved our alphabet agencies spying on Trump and carrying water for Clinton. And if those breadcrumbs should lead back to the White House, that would solve a huge problem… for Obama.

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